Translating myself #17: Transparency in translation
“No translation is ever innocent.”
Alberto Manguel, Argentine-Canadian writer and translator
Hello.
Let me jump right in with a question: should translators have a style?
Russian writer Nikolai Gogol did not think they should. “The translator”, he wrote, “should be like glass: so transparent that you can’t see him.”
I am reminded of George Orwell’s declaration that “good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.”
Orwell was being disingenuous. He may have been championing a type of writing that does not flout its flourishes, but even the plainest prose is underpinned by authorial choices – what to reveal, what to conceal, how to present ideas or introduce characters.
But back to translation.
Gogol may have had in mind an ideal of translation that is unattainable – and, I would argue, undesirable. Such transparency in translation would require a linguistic parity between the source and target languages that does not exist.
On this subject, I have quoted, in an earlier newsletter, the Greek-American poet and translator Kimon Friar who noted that “[e]ven the simplest word can never be rendered with its exact equivalent into another language.”
In a similar vein, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer declared that “[a] major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.”
To translate, by necessity, is to transform.
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And this is before we even begin to consider the issue of translators’ biases – the male-centred world-view of early versions of The Odyssey, for instance, or the drawing-room coyness of early 19th century translations of Tolstoy.
In practice, the notion that translators should never draw attention to themselves by doing something other than cleanly transpose a text between languages is not feasible. It is also demeaning to the translator.
Let me now bring in the doyenne of American translators, Edith Grossman, who has some strong views on the question of the translator’s invisibility:
Aren’t we [translators] simply the humble, anonymous handmaids-and-men of literature, the grateful, every-obsequious servants of the publishing industry? In the most resounding yet decorous terms I can muster, the answer is no…”
Translators, she argues, are writers. Translation, I would add, requires authorial creativity, and authorial choices. And while it would be misguided to suppose that a translator’s personal style should take priority over the original author’s intentions, the most succesful translators certainly have a unique style of – a particular approach to – translation. A translator brings as much of him or herself into translating a novel as the original author does.
To return to Gogol: if translators are like glass, then perhaps they are more like stained glass windows, bringing their own opacities into the mix, transforming the light as it shines through them.
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It is late in the day, dear reader, but perhaps you have some thoughts on this topic. When you read works originally written in other languages, do you expect a translator to remain invisible – as transparent as glass? Or do you welcome a translator’s conspicuous interventions?